Dubstopia, a book of short stories that are connected but also stand alone. A confused book, for our times! Am also going to throw the dust off a novella I tried to write on the MA called Little Town Moone, a murderous tale told backwards. June Considine very kindly called it ‘spell-binding’ when I read an extract last year at the IWC for the first leg of the Italo-Irish Literature Exchange. But it was my first frivoling with fiction after a long stretch in journalism and it was hugely flawed so I left it under the stairs with the hoover. I’m ready go to back to it now and hammer out a good draft. So I’ll mainly talk about Dubstopia here because it makes me laugh and is fun, something I’m writing to stop taking the business of writing so seriously.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

A course I did at the IWC called Tales of the City which examined the cityscape as a type of icing layer of realism: writing about the things we see under our noses, uncomfortable things for the most part, as far away from stone wall farms and finches singing on thatched cottages and begorrah Ireland that so many writers are still overly concerned with. I wanted to write gritty awful shit, but pull it up a notch, play around with language, rob from Joyce’s Edwardian bread bin, make the reader cringe and laugh, but most importantly portray the characters as real in their tiny turmoils. There’s a ‘bigger story’ going on too, a thread with the Russian mafia and some junkies in Phibsboro who are squatting above an empty bank. The first story introduces all the characters (including a heroin addicted Jack Russell) but mainly involves the chaotic day in one of their lives. Stories that follow on are like a relay, they shove the bigger story forward, though some are just stand-alone fingerprints of how a particular character ended up where they did. Widearse Wendy for instance, who grew up in an affluent north Dublin suburb but ends up on the streets because of one awful thing that happens her. Leather Joe who is dangerously charismatic but a seasoned psychopath. Stories too from growing up in a crazed repressed Ireland that was brilliantly cruel. I want to mess around with form, with the idea of connected short stories that could also be a novel. There’s a lot about the traditional short story I love, but I hate the exclusive treatment it gets, that kind of meliority makes me uncomfortable. And a lot of the time I find novels boring, or at least they don’t drag me all the way to their end point without losing the plot. I like the idea of mulch, knocking some of the gentle beauty out of the short story, upsetting its privileged rhythm.

What genre does your book fall under?

Social realism panini’d with surrealism.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

The whole of Phibsboro, especially down the canal. I’d offer a caravan-load of Dutch Gold to each citizen actor to star as themselves, no scripting required. If that sounds mean, go live in Phibsboro for a year.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Dublin’s dank underworld and its visceral phlegm-filled charm, as seen through the eyes of ordinary struggling lunatics, not gangland or criminal butch.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I don’t imagine anyone will want to publish a book of short stories by an unknown fiction writer, so one thing I’m going to do is send off each story to a decent literary magazine (Stinging Fly, Dublin Quarterly, The Moth, etc.) and see what happens. Here’s another thing that makes me uncomfortable: there are so many online journals, electronic post boxes to shove your stories through, but should we give our work away so easily? We’re in this [awful] era of self publicising as a form of arts mania. Writers belt-notching by sending out their work to all kinds of irrelevant places, just to get their name in print. Reading poems and stories in public every chance they get, flinging up websites with wonderful credentials they think set them apart from the next person with wonderful credentials. I feel exceptionally shy about all that yack. What is it to be published if you don’t care where or how? I just want to find out if I can be a good writer on the page, not to get carried away with the business model. I made the mistake of sending off first drafts (of anything) to competitions over the last two years, just to see if I could write and they all got shortlisted, but none of them were particularly up to scratch, writing I could feel proud of. I’ve learnt from that. Posting off imperfect tat even if it’s good enough to make the grade so far, I want and need to do better. It’s about borrowing the confidence until it happens on your terms, to stop grappling with that inner Stalin that sits smugly on every writer’s shoulder. I’m too conservative to consider self publishing, I know many people are making great headway here, but the idea makes me cringe. My idea is to let each story ‘get somewhere’ on its own accord and maybe then I’ll stick them together into a yoke with a gooey cover and give it to friends and dying enemies for Christmas. With Little Town Moone however, I’m relying on conventional publishing bewitchery! A friend of mine whose a book scout has said: “Hurry up June, I want to read it…it’s just you and one other person in Dublin whose books I’m waiting on!” A mix of orgasm & heart attack, that someone could believe in me that much from the little smidgen they read.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Writing Dubstopia now, gizza chance! The novella will be tackled on Eoin McNamee’s course, followed by a stunt away alone writing that my lovely lover is organising. Both will be done this year. Determined!

No-one seems to be writing the nitty about our gloriously shit city, it seems to be the reserve of the skewed detective in a crime series novel or tales of the middle classes struggling to find themselves in the underpants of a dreary bedeviled partner, or ghost stories about great grannies or worse, as is a recent trend, writers writing about writers writing, the worst type of literary cannibalism there is.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

Ridiculous characters too true to life, talking dogs, a Russian war-lord who lives in an electronic house standing on chicken legs, oh the things that drugs make you do, the city as a compost-bin Atlantis, liberal use of swearing and made-up words that still manage to make sense.

How the Next Big Thing blog hop works
An author answers ten questions and then tags authors to do the same thing the following week on the same day, which in this case is a Wednesday. For this purpose I’m tagging the wonderfully multi-talented Emer Martin whose books are ‘up there’ with the best of modern Irish fiction. She’s written three novels and has just completed a fourth. She’s also a painter, film director and creative writing teacher. Niamh MacAlister who also took part in the Italo-Irish Literature Exchange in Verona in May (and put up with my mood swings). She was shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing awards 2012. She also writes poetry and took part in the ‘New and Emerging Poet’ Poetry Ireland Introductions Series and has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Raft, and Washington Square Review. I’m cheating abysmally here: Henry McDonald, author of eight non-fiction books and also my partner who shares my blog. He’s already completed one novel (a thriller) that’s looking for a publisher and he’s working on an exciting new novel about kids during one day of The Troubles.
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About junecaldwell

June's short story collection Room Little Darker is published by New Island Books in May 2017. She's a prizewinner of The Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted and highly commended for many others including: Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award, Sunday Business Post/Penguin short story prize, Lorian Hemingway (USA), RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland and Over The Edge New Writer of the Year. In 2010 she received an Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) bursary for fiction. Her work has been showcased at the Italo-Irish Literature Exchange in Nogarole Rocca / Verona (May 2012), Read For The World (June 2012) and Bloomnibus (June 2013) at the Irish Writers' Centre, Galway Pro Choice (Aug 2013), Over the Edge Galway (Dec 2013), Stinging Fly Spring Launch (March 2014), At The Edge, Cavan (May 2014), The Winding Stair Prizewinner's Reading (Sep 2014), One City One Book: DLR Lexicon Barrytown Trilogy reading (April 2015), Hodges Figgis Book Festival (Oct 2015), Bogman's Canon Fiction Disco (Nov 2015, April 2016), Doolin Writers' Weekend (March 2016), Five Lamps Arts Festival (Mar 2016), National Concert Hall: Kevin Barry Recital Room series (April 2016) and the Eastrogen Rising: A Rebel Cabaret. Her creative writing has been published in Woven Tale Press, The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Literary Orphans and Popshot, as well as a non-fiction biography of a Trouble's moll with Gill and MacMillan in 2006. Her short story 'SOMAT' is published in The Long Gaze Back: The Anthology of Irish Women Writers, edited by Sinéad Gleeson/New Island. Journalism: The Gloss, The Guardian, The Observer, Sunday Times, Sunday Life, Sunday Tribune, Sunday Business Post, Sunday Independent, Ireland on Sunday, Irish Independent, as well as a number of women's magazines and trade journals.